Things I Learned - January 2025
Hello and greetings from New Orleans. This is a (day late) version of January’s Things I Learned.
Things I Learned
15% of all Uber ride bookings either begin or end at an airport (source).
Mr. Potato Head was the first toy to be advertised on television. (source)
KLM, the Dutch national airline, flies to twice as many destinations in the U.K. as does British Airways (source and source).
Viviparity is a phenomenon found in plants where they reproduce through live births, essentially forgoing the use of seeds to spread new descendants and instead growing a child plant right away, while still attached to its parent plant. Mangroves are one example of this. (source)
Hugo Boss was the primary supplier of uniforms for the Nazi army. (source)
The world’s largest human gathering in history — with 400 million people in attendance — is a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela that commemorates a legend in which demons and gods fight over a pitcher carrying the nectar of immortality (source).
From 2010 to 2014, life expectancy in Syria fell from 79.5 to 55.7. (source)
The Graham cracker was invented by the temperance movement preacher Sylvester Graham as a purposefully dull cracker that would curb sinful desires, including the prevention of masturbation. (source)
Delta involuntarily bumped exactly 1 passenger in 2024. American Airlines bumped 13,200 (source).
Pandas, the most popular data analysis library for the most popular coding language (Python), was invented at the hedge fund AQR. (source)
In the 1850s, the US suffered large fires (i.e., those destroying 20+ buildings) once every two weeks. Over the same period, England, with a similar population size, suffered them in its provincial towns once every two or three years. (source)
25% of the New York City’s MTA — roughly 22,000 employees — make 6 figure salaries. (source).
The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) is the only horror movie to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Only 5 other horror films have ever been nominated. (source)
The average margin of victory is 12.2 points in the NBA, 3.5 points in the MLB, 2.3 points in the NHL, and 11.1 points in the NFL.
Denmark, South Korea, the UK, and the US are the only countries in the OECD to tax estates. (source)
The northern and southern hemisphere are artifacts of the earth’s geometry (the equator), while the Western and Eastern hemispheres are entirely human-made, arbitrary designations. (source)
Also, Africa is the only continent with land in all four hemispheres.
Graphs I Liked
Defense Spending as % of GDP and Distance of Capital From Moscow
Inflation Expectations by Political Party (note the huge jump, by party, around the 2024 election)
Median lifespan by wealth bracket
Number of men’s tennis players with a 1 handed back-handed to make it to at least the third round of a grand slam tournament.
Talk about a big divergence!
Finally…
I usually keep this final section as a floating category, e.g. for personal news, summaries of my year, stray thoughts, etc. Today I wanted to highlight an obituary I came across. I didn’t know this person (he’s friend of a friend) but I found it particularly moving, not only because aspects of his life were strikingly similar to mine, but also because the tone, sentiment, and attention to detail captured exactly what I would hope for in my own obituary. More broadly, obituaries (and eulogies) are a literary form I haven’t encountered often, at least at my age. This one stood out as exceptionally well written in that it conveyed the character of a person I had never met.
Some other articles I enjoyed reading this month
Syria flooded with Pepsi and Pringles as rulers open economy
How Taiwan Became a Bond Market Superpower
Ft. this fact: “Taiwan…has invested a ton in US bonds. A ton. Its holdings of foreign exchange reserves…and overseas fixed income securities together total $1.7tn. That’s more than 200 per cent of the country’s GDP, more than five times the size of the entire domestic Taiwanese bond market, and roughly the equivalent of all of Pimco’s fixed income funds. In fact, it’s not much less than the net holdings of Taiwan’s much larger neighbour across the strait, Mainland China…”